I was in the field watching a tank gunnery exercise when my aide shouted over the roar of the firing that GOMO was trying to reach me. I drove back to headquarters and put through a call to the Pentagon. General Hudachek was leaving, I was informed, going off to Korea to be chief of staff of the Eighth Army. Major General Ted Jenes was coming out from Fort Leavenworth to replace him. So far, none of this directly concerned me. The colonel at GOMO went on. I would not be staying at Fort Carson, he said. In August, I was going to be assigned to Fort Leavenworth to take over Jenes’s job as deputy commanding general of an operation called CACDA, Combined Arms Combat Development Activity.
I hung up the phone suspended somewhere between hope and bewilderment. Jenes was a two-star. The job he was vacating and that I was going to was a two-star slot. Either the folks at the Pentagon had not seen my latest efficiency report or I had been brought back from the dead.
On an afternoon toward the end of July, Alma and I headed for the conference room down the hall from General Hudachek’s office. The brigade commanders, battalion commanders, division staff officers, and their wives greeted our entrance. I had often served as buffer, lightning rod, and father confessor between these officers and our commanding general. We had managed to create an able, if not always a happy, ship. My old pal Tom Blagg was gone by now, replaced by a new chief of staff named Bill Flynn. Flynn delivered a gracious speech and presented me with the division’s going-away gift, a statue of a cowboy in chaps sculpted by a prominent Western artist, Michael Garmon. I followed with my own farewell speech. All the while these festivities were going on, Jack Hudachek remained twenty feet away, behind his closed office door. The party broke up, Alma went home, and I returned to my office to pack up a few things.
“The general will see you now.” I turned to see Hudachek’s secretary standing in my doorway. As I went in, he mumbled something that sounded like “Best of luck.” Same to you. He handed me a plaque with the division seal glued on it. We shook hands perfunctorily, and I left. A parade had marked my arrival at Fort Carson, but I departed without banners or bugles.
… … …
As I prepared to go to Fort Leavenworth, I was still not sure what Mother Army was up to, but I began to believe that my career had not crash-dived. I had done some poking around and learned that not only was I going into a two-star job with one star on my shoulder, but the new position had provided a launch pad to higher rank for all its previous incumbents. I learned how I had been rescued from oblivion. General Richard G. Cavazos, commander of FORSCOM, was the superior of General Ross, the senior rater on my efficiency report. Cavazos, a hero during the Korean War, was an Army legend. When this officer talked about what it meant to be a soldier, to offer your life in the service of your country, he brought grown men to tears. The deeply conscientious Cavazos kept a close eye on all division commanders in FORSCOM, and he had come out to Fort Carson occasionally to look over the Hudachek operation.
After the last such trip, Cavazos had flown back to Atlanta with Julius Becton. As Becton later reported the conversation, Cavazos had told him that he was concerned about Hudachek’s division. “Did you notice anything in that conference room today?” Cavazos had asked Becton. “The only one who dared say anything in Hudachek’s presence was Powell. The rest of them were terrified.” Cavazos was not in my rating chain; his deputy, Ross, had rated me. But in the Army there are rating systems and there are rating systems. Until you become a general, the promotion machinery is fairly formal. There are not that many generals, though, so an informal network operates at that level. Chats over drinks at the officers’ club, phone calls, the gossip mill, the old bulls sniffing the air and figuring out what is really happening become as important as efficiency reports. What this inner circle had apparently concluded was that, yes, Powell got into trouble at Carson. However, he had done what he thought was right, and had risked putting his head in a noose. He probably needs to watch his mouth and his step. In the end, however, it came down to the fact that the generals knew the officer being rated and they knew the officer who had rated him. My future was not foreclosed.
At this time, I received a letter from a White House Fellowship alumnus, Tom O’Brien, who worked at Harvard. Tom asked if I was interested in a job as the university’s director of financial programs. What I knew about academic finance would fit on a dime. Yet, it was nice to be wanted, particularly after the close call. Given the new assignment, however, I could tear up my civilian-tailored résumé and turn down the Harvard nibble. I was going back to Fort Leavenworth, fourteen years after I had attended Command and General Staff College there, and glad of it. Shortly after the family arrived at Leavenworth, the new major general promotion list came out; I was on it and could expect to be promoted within a year.
My new job at Leavenworth was vital to the Army, but would not sound particularly thrilling to laymen. Under its latest reorganization, the Army had divided U.S.-based forces into two commands. Forces Command, FORSCOM, controlled the units and prepared them for war. Training and Doctrine Command, TRADOC, developed war fighting doctrine and operated training facilities to provide the trained troops to FORSCOM. A prime TRADOC objective was to make sure the different schools—infantry, armor, artillery, and air defense, for example—trained their forces to fight as a team, rather than solo performers. TRADOC had created an organization to promote that objective, the Combined Arms Combat Development Activity. I was now CACDA’s deputy commander, under an energetic three-star general, Jack Merritt. I quickly found myself caught up in an assignment near to the heart of my old mentor, General John Wickham, designing a lighter-equipped, smaller infantry division for faster battlefield mobility, particularly useful in Third World conflicts.
One of the historic houses at Fort Leavenworth was 611 Scott. Built in 1841, it had originally been the sutler’s place, the PX of those days. Generals William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and George Armstrong Custer had all lived under this roof. The impetuous Custer, according to legend, left from this house when he set out for the Little Bighorn. And the ghost of Mrs. Sheridan still haunted 611 Scott. Sheridan had left the unhappy woman behind when he went off on a trip to Chicago, and she died while he was gone. Thereafter, her spirit supposedly never left the house. Today, 611 Scott is a ten-thousand-square-foot gleaming white mini-mansion set above the Missouri River. The dining room easily seats forty. The grounds are beautifully landscaped, and a handsome gazebo rises on the front lawn. This was now our home. Alma finally had her mansion. And I, at long last, was redeemed in her eyes.
The latest family move meant we had to uproot the girls again and plunk them down in new schools. It took Annemarie her usual day and a half to get settled and start showing up with friends. Whatever pain and frustration the disruption inflicted, she confided and confined to a little diary she kept.
By now, Linda was attending her fourth high school, a little disruptive for any teenager. Leavenworth High School, however, had more black students than her earlier schools, which led to a formative experience in her life. Linda’s high school drama department had decided to stage an anthology of scenes from several plays. The black girls, including Linda, had chosen something from For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. The content is fairly rough for high school students, and their choice sparked a furor. A week before the performance, the administration canceled the black segment.
I promised my angry daughter that I would read the play. Apart from the jarring fact for a father that his daughter had been cast as a prostitute, I thought the work was strong and honest. I called the principal and expressed my opinion. Linda wrote an editorial for the school paper attacking the cancellation. The administration stuck by its decision, but made one concession. During the part of the performance when the scene from Colored Girls would have been presented, the black students would be allowed to discuss with the audience the issue of the cancellation.
I told Linda that we had both gone through the cha
in of command, and Army-like, it was now her responsibility to abide by the decision. On the last night of the performances, however, Linda had a surprise in store. During the discussion period, she stepped forward and said, “I think you might like to see what we have been talking about.” She then proceeded to perform her part. After initial astonishment, the audience burst into applause. I do not know if Alma and I have ever been prouder. We thought, however, that we were only observing a girl’s brave gesture. Instead, we were witnessing a young woman choosing her destiny. Linda was determined to become an actress and never looked back.
One afternoon in September, I slipped out of a marathon briefing on Army communications and came home early. “Colin,” Alma said, “you need a haircut.” I had not done that well at the post barbershop and managed to dredge up from my memory a shop in the black section of Leavenworth that I had patronized fourteen years before. I drove downtown, and there was the shop, just as I remembered it, down to the striped barber pole in front. Inside, faded pinups advertising ancient hair tonics covered the wall. Dog-eared magazines littered a rack, and the place had that unique barbershop fragrance. The shop was empty except for a barber older than his posters.
He put down his newspaper and waved me to a chair. “Welcome, General,” he said, introducing himself as “Old Sarge” and draping a striped sheet over me. As he snipped away, I studied the photographs over the mirror, black generals, including Rock Cartwright, Julius Becton, Roscoe Robinson, Emmet Paige, and Harry Brooks, all from the generation just ahead of me. The barber handed me a small red-covered diary. “I’m going to ask you to sign my book when we’re done,” he said. The cover was stamped “1959.” I started thumbing through it, studying the signatures, caught up in the parade of familiar names. His little red book read like black military history. Early signatures were mostly of majors, then a few lieutenant colonels, and in more recent years, a comforting number of more senior officers. And then I stopped short. There, in 1968, I found “Colin Powell, Major, USA.” I had no recollection of signing the book.
“You don’t remember me,” Old Sarge said, “but I remember you.”
He held up a hand mirror so I could see the back of my head. I nodded my approval. He removed the sheet and shook it out. I fished out a pen and signed the book, this time as “Brigadier General Powell.” “What’s your name again?” I asked.
“Jalester Linton,” he said, “10th Cavalry, Buffalo Soldiers.”
I was not only reading black military history, I was shaking its hand. We got to talking about all the sites on the post named for fabled soldiers of the past, like Grant Avenue and Eisenhower Hall. I asked Old Sarge if anything at Leavenworth commemorated the Buffalo Soldiers. “Well,” Linton said, “there’s 9th and 10th Cavalry avenues.” I had never heard of them.
I became curious about the history of the Buffalo Soldiers. I started reading everything I could lay my hands on. What I learned filled me with pride at the feats these black men had achieved and with sadness at the injustices and neglect they had suffered. Blacks had fought in just about all of America’s wars. They served to prove themselves the equal of white soldiers, which was precisely why some whites did not want blacks in uniform. My reading led me to the words of Howell Cobb, a Confederate general, who advised Jefferson Davis against arming blacks. “Use all the negroes you can get for … cooking, digging, chopping and such,” Cobb said. “But don’t arm them. If slaves will make good soldiers,” he warned, “our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” Frederick Douglass put it another way: “Once you let the black man get upon his person the brass letters ‘U.S.,’ let him get an eagle on his button and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.”
In 1867, Congress officially put that eagle on the buttons and put bullets in the pockets when it created four black regiments. For twenty-two years, a white officer, Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson, commanded one of them, the 10th Cavalry. When Grierson finally bid goodbye to his troops, he said, “The valuable service to their country cannot fail, sooner or later, to meet with due recognition and reward.” Ninety-five years later, it was too late for reward, and I did not see much recognition of the Buffalo Soldiers either.
I read about the fate of Lieutenant Henry O. Flipper. Imagine a child born into slavery, yet possessing the grit to get himself admitted to the U.S. Military Academy in 1873, just ten years after Emancipation. Every black cadet before Flipper had been shunned, reviled, and ultimately hounded from West Point. Flipper took it all for four years without breaking and graduated in 1877. He was sent out West in 1878 to join Troop A, 10th Cavalry, the first black officer ever assigned to the Buffalo Soldiers. Three years later, bigots in uniform framed him on a charge of embezzling from commissary funds. A court-martial found Flipper innocent of that charge, but guilty of “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” He was given a dishonorable discharge, his military career in ruins by age twenty-five. The resilient Flipper nevertheless managed to carve out successful careers as a mining engineer, author, and newspaper editor. But the stain on his honor obsessed him, and he spent the final years of his life fruitlessly trying to clear his name. The finding of the court-martial was finally reversed in 1976 through the determined efforts of a white schoolteacher from Georgia named Ray MacColl.
During the court-martial, Flipper’s attorney had put the question squarely: “Whether it is possible for a colored man to secure and hold a position as an officer of the Army?” My own career and that of thousands of other black officers answered with a resounding yes. But we knew that the path through the underbrush of prejudice and discrimination had been cleared by the sacrifices of nameless blacks who had gone before us, the Old Sarges and Henry Flippers. To them we owed everything.
Not long after my visit to the barbershop, I was jogging past the post cemetery and came upon an abandoned trailer park. Nothing was left but crumbling concrete platforms and an intersection of gravel roads. There I saw a leaning, weather-beaten street sign marking 9th Cavalry Avenue and another marking 10th Cavalry Avenue. I was still upset when I got back to my quarters. I took a shower, went to my office, and called in the post historian, retired Colonel Robert von Schlemmer. “Is that the best we can do?” I said. “Two dirt roads in an abandoned trailer park?”
“Sir, you’re right,” von Schlemmer said patiently. “But before you blow a gasket, you should know what I went through just to get the Buffalo Soldiers even that recognition.”
“Fine,” I said, “but where do we go from here? I want something more appropriate honoring the memory of those men.”
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “If you’ll take the lead, I’ll get the Leavenworth Historical Society behind you, and we’ll throw in some seed money, maybe five thousand dollars. But you’ve got to figure out what you want to do.”
I had been thinking about it all morning. “Leavenworth is full of equestrian statues,” I pointed out. “I’d like to see a statue here honoring the Buffalo Soldiers. It ought to stand on the bluff overlooking the Missouri, with the cavalryman facing west, headed toward the future.”
Five thousand dollars was not going to produce much of a statue, von Schlemmer warned. The first thing I was going to have to learn was how to raise money.
I believed I had a duty to those black troops who had eased my way. Building a memorial to the Buffalo Soldiers became my personal crusade. I called in Captain Phil Coker, Hudachek’s former aide, whom I had brought from Fort Carson. “You’re 10th Cavalry, aren’t you?” I asked Phil. Yes, Coker said, he had been part of the squadron at Fort Carson, obviously long after the 10th had been integrated, which occurred during the Korean War. “You’re going to immortalize your old outfit,” I told him. “You’re going to dig up the history of the Buffalo Soldiers.” Coker went at it as if we were talking about his ancestors. He scoured the archives while I started looking for money. Those troops had suffered second-class treatment after se
rving as first-class fighting men. I was determined that the Buffalo Soldiers were finally going to go first-class.
John Wickham came back into my life while I was at Fort Leavenworth. In the spring of 1983, Wickham was about to become Army Chief of Staff. He called me from Washington to say that he had drawn up a list of thirteen of the brightest lieutenant colonels and colonels he could find. He asked me, as a brigadier general, to lead them on a one-month crash study to find out where he ought to be taking the Army over the next four years. Since I was the fourteenth officer, he called the enterprise Project 14.
It was now nearly a dozen years since the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, and the Army was almost completely recovered from the trauma of that conflict. On May 27, 1983, we turned in the Project 14 report, recommending to Wickham some modest course corrections. The one point we underscored was that the Army could not stand another Desert One fiasco. The Army exists to win battles and wars, not just to manage itself well. If we expected to restore the nation’s confidence in us, we had to succeed in the next test of arms.
I flew to Washington to brief General Wickham and his staff on the final report. Afterward, as the two of us walked back to his office, I took the opportunity to seek his counsel about something troubling me. Wickham’s predecessor, General Shy Meyer, had assured me that he intended to keep me at Leavenworth for two years, then put me in line for a division command, which I wanted more than anything. But during this trip to Washington, I had heard disquieting rumors. “I hear I’m being considered to replace Carl Smith as Weinberger’s senior military assistant,” I told Wickham, hoping against hope that he could knock the report down.
“That’s right,” Wickham said. “Pete Dawkins’s name is up too. But I think you’re better suited.” It was hardly the answer I wanted. Dawkins, my long-ago classmate at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, was still the Army’s golden boy, the exemplar of exemplars. “I’m all for Pete Dawkins for the job,” I said. “I’ve only been out of the Pentagon for twenty-two months. I’ve paid my dues. I’ve already served as military assistant to three deputy secretaries. General, don’t let this happen to me again.” I feared being branded permanently as a military dilettante, I told him. Wickham remained noncommittal, and I got out of town and back to Kansas as fast as I could.
My American Journey Page 34